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This is the time of year when young students are asked to reflect on their experiences over summer break and write their back-to-school essay. The summer season is often the busiest, filled with activities, sunshine, and (hopefully) some quality time on the water. For aquatic scientists, although we don’t generally get a break over the summer, this pattern holds. We try our best to capture the burst of biological, chemical, and physical activity that occurs in water bodies in the summertime. It seems appropriate, as a graduate student studying water, that I do a similar reflection. Here it is: my “What I Did Last

Summer” essay.

Evening operations of a sediment sampler on Lake Superior (photo by Kateri Salk)

I’ve had the privilege this year to study the largest freshwater body in the world, the Laurentian Great Lakes. Together, the five lakes make up nearly 20% of the Earth’s fresh water and supply 40 million people with drinking water. Being so large and depended on by so many people, the Great Lakes have unique ecology and environmental issues that are fascinating for aquatic scientists to study. The research I conducted this summer has, in many ways, explored two extremes within the Great Lakes. The projects I worked on took me to Lake Superior (the clearest, deepest, and most surrounded by wilderness) and Lake Erie (the shallowest, most populous, and most impacted by algae blooms).

An aerial photo of an algal bloom in the western basin of Lake Erie (photo by Daniel Raible, NASA Glenn)

What ties these dissimilar environments together is a common question: how is the biology of the system interacting with a key element for life, nitrogen? Which organisms are using nitrogen, and what happens to it after organisms take it in or transform it chemically? In Sandusky Bay in Lake Erie, a great deal of nitrogen runoff flows from the Sandusky River into the bay. Much of this nitrogen is lost from the water before it reaches the main part of Lake Erie, so we want to know which organisms are responsible for this reduction and how it might be impacting the species of toxic algae that grow in Sandusky Bay vs. the main part of the lake. In collaboration with a team from Bowling Green State University, I’ve been tracking the microbes that remove dissolved nitrogen from the water and release it to the atmosphere. We hope to be able to make connections between toxic algae growth and the trends in nutrients, including nitrogen, in Lake Erie.

While Lake Erie struggles with pea-green water that’s packed with algae, Lake Superior is crystal clear, mainly because of a lack of phosphorus, a nutrient that supports algal growth. Sandusky Bay displays boom-and-bust trends in nitrogen concentrations, whereas Lake Superior has a more constant, moderate amount of nitrogen that is left behind in the water because algal growth is limited by phosphorus. One possible commonality between the two environments is that microbial communities could be converting dissolved nitrogen to a chemical form called nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. For both projects, I am investigating which communities of microbes are producing nitrous oxide and how much of it is released to the atmosphere.

As different as these two projects were in terms of the environment, scientific operations were quite different as well. In Sandusky Bay, the depth of the water is just a few meters deep. This means that research can be done from a motorboat, and water can be collected directly into a bottle from the side of the boat. Even sediment can be gathered by means of a long tube, a gasket that pulls suction, and a little muscle.

Sediment collection from Sandusky Bay. Notice the bright green color of the water; the algal bloom is out in full force!

Lake Superior science is a different beast. This research was done aboard a research ship, the R/V Blue Heron (its sister ship is the one from The Perfect Storm, to give you an idea of its size and the high seas it can handle). Scientists work and live on the ship for several days on end, and there is a full-time crew that runs the ship while research goes on. Water and sediment collections must be done with heavy equipment that is deployed by motorized winches, and hard hats are worn on deck.

Ship operations on the R/V Blue Heron in Lake Superior. Sediment and water collectors are lowered on motorized winches, often hundreds of feet below the surface. Notice how blue and clear the water is in comparison to Lake Erie (photos by Chris Filstrup, Tristan Horner and Kateri Salk)

This research campaign was part of a training program run by the Large Lakes Observatory at the University of Minnesota. In addition to the research I conducted on board the ship, I also was trained on how to lead scientific operations aboard a research vessel. This meant that I got to experience the wide variety of the capabilities of the ship: collecting water and sediment, deploying large nets to collect tiny swimming animals (zooplankton), using remotely operated vehicles to explore beneath the surface, and setting off in a small boat to collect samples in shallow water.

Shipboard research involves many activities: collecting water and chemistry data from a variety of depths, using nets to collect small swimming organisms, practicing driving a remotely operated vehicle in a container on board, and setting off into the Apostle Islands for a shallow water expedition (photos by Tristan Horner and Chris Filstrup)

Just as the school kids are back in class, it’s time for me to shift out of summer mode. I plan to spend my fall semester in the laboratory, analyzing the samples that have been collected from the Great Lakes over the summertime. Many thanks to the Rose Fellowship in Water Research, the MSU College of Natural Science, and the MSU Department of Integrative Biology for supporting this research.

Kateri Salk is a Ph.D. student in Integrative Biology and Environmental Science and Policy. She is the first recipient of the Joan Rose Fellowship in Water Research.

I’ve been invited to give a talk on the role of fresh water fisheries in food security, and this has got me to thinking more broadly about water and how it plays into food production. I’m concerned about the future, and I sense that I am not the only one. There is a growing realization that water is a limiting factor—perhaps the most limiting factor—in getting adequate amounts of food into hungry mouths in poorer parts of the planet. Water is creeping higher on the food agenda here, too. Think, for example, of breadbasket states like California, which is in the midst of its third year of severe drought with no end in sight.

Unsettling news is everywhere. We hear about plunging water tables, not just in India and other developing countries, but in drier parts of the US, where withdrawals for irrigation have been outpacing recharge rates for years. We see photos of rivers that don’t quite make it to the sea as water is unsustainably diverted for other uses far upstream. We read about land grabbing by powerful, narrow interests, not just as a means to control agriculture, but as a stealth means to control water resources. And there is no shortage of news coverage of the world’s changing climate and its potential impacts on rainfall patterns.

Because of my background, I tend to filter these disturbing reports through the lens of land-based crop production. But in preparing my talk, I’ve been forced to think, too, about a parallel source of food security: calories that come directly from the water. Aquaculture figures prominently into this equation, but fishing is important, too. Stephen Hall and his collaborators (Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 110, 8393-8398) document the disproportionate role that wild-caught fish play in meeting human protein needs in more than a dozen developing countries. Those interested in fish (including some of our very own, see Global Food Security 3, 142-148) have struggled for years to raise awareness of the significance of finned creatures in feeding poor people. But there is still lack of appreciation for this second pathway that water takes in helping to feed people.

I am not the only one boxed in by disciplinary bias in approaching what is in fact a wicked systems problem. Some like me bring the perspective of land-based agriculture. Others focus on fish. Still others take a broad natural resources approach with no particular emphasis on water as a means of food production. The MSU Water Community has been recently brought up to full strength, with new expertise joining old expertise aligned along each of these and other perspectives. If we want to attack the water-food problem or any other problem having water as a major component, how do we match up and integrate the right kinds expertise on campus, creating the most productive research teams to get the job done?

In a perfect world, someone who has spent his or her entire career trying to increase crop yields in Africa would immediately grasp the value of a new colleague who knows a lot about water. Or vice versa. But in the real world understanding across disciplinary boundaries rarely appears spontaneously, and when it does, progress usually comes in fits and starts. Minds occasionally do meet serendipitously, but the process is often slow and inefficient at big, complicated places like MSU.

That’s why with support from the Office of the Vice-President for Research and Graduate Studies and other campus offices, ESPP is about to roll out WaterCube. We want to maximize the chances that water researchers at MSU will find one another, click as a research team, and solve an important problem—either a water and food security issue or some other crucial problem centered on water.

WaterCube is not your grandfather’s program for awarding internal grants. There are no pre-defined research goals, no grant proposals, and no review panels. Instead, individual water faculty willing to invest a bit of their own research funds will earn a token that has much more value. But the value can only be realized if the token is united with tokens from one or more faculty partners willing to commit to a cool new research project. The token holders get to decide on the nature of the project.

We call this process cubation (toking was also considered but we thought that this word might be misinterpreted). Cubation is designed to create novel water teams and provide them with seed funding to tackle something new. We want to minimize transaction costs, and we want team members to have fun discovering one another and working together. So within very broad bounds, it is up to the cubation team to define objectives and the scope of the work, to make progress towards a solution, and ultimately to attract external funding.

All of the major problems that count these days require complex solutions that transcend what any one discipline can offer. Cubation is about putting people together in the right configurations to tackle the right problems. Let the experiment begin.